O’Donnell’s Target This Time: Rush Limbaugh

Incendiary talk-show host Lawrence O’Donnell has launched another vicious attack on a conservative commentator who doesn’t happen to view the world as O’Donnell views it.

This time, O’Donnell aimed his ire at Rush Limbaugh, the influential radio talk-show personality who boasts millions of more listeners than O’Donnell has viewers for his MSNBC show “The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell.”

The issue: Racial politics, Herman Cain and how liberals (represented by O’Donnell and his guests) and conservatives (represented here by Limbaugh) view the current state of race relations in America.

On that subject, O’Donnell accused Limbaugh of trafficking in “pure hatred.” O’Donnell also seemed to try and link Limbaugh, 60, with the violence perpetrated by the Ku Klux Klan during the era of the civil rights movement in the 1950s and ’60s.

The race issue flared up following an appearance on “Last Word” by Toure, a one-named African-American commentator described on Wikipedia as a “cultural critic.” According to this summary on The Huffington Post, Toure criticized Herman Cain as a “lightweight” who is “[reasserting] this myth of black docility” by acting as a “minstrel” for the GOP.

Toure issued these statements Monday on “Last Word,” so on Tuesday, Limbaugh commented on them on his radio show. According to the HuffPo account, Limbaugh said, basically, that Toure was saying only liberals such as himself or, presumably, O’Donnell, are permitted to define or otherwise dictate the debate about racism and racial issues. “What he was trying to say is, ‘They are stealing our technique’,” Limbaugh said. “ ‘We are the ones who get to decide who is racist and who isn’t . . . We own that ploy!’ ”

So O’Donnell, who often practices his own technique of lashing out at conservative TV and radio personalities in an effort to inflame his own followers, fired back at Limbaugh on Tuesday’s “Last Word.”

“In a country with a long painful and ugly history,” O’Donnell sermonized, “you would think that Rush Limbaugh could comprehend why some of the things he has said over the years might offend the racial sensibilities of some reasonable people. Rush Limbaugh can remember black children being killed in churches by the Ku Klux Klan during his lifetime.”

The HuffPo story says O’Donnell then played some audio of Limbaugh’s past statements about race that, to O’Donnell, somehow “proves” Limbaugh’s racism.

It’s all so ridiculous, isn’t it? The media takes up a lot of time critiquing the media and, meanwhile, the problems of our nation and the world go unsolved.

And, we’ve said this before: But when will Lawrence O’Donnell learn that these attacks on his rivals on the other side of the media “aisle” are not helping him build an audience? In the October ratings, he still was averaging only 830,000 viewers nightly.